Hypochondriasis
by infamouslastwords
Summary: Arthur/Eames. Another dream wasted on you.


**Hypochondriasis**

**by** infamous_last_**words**

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**A/N:** Every "he" is referring Arthur, and every "you" is referring to Eames, strictly (except for dialogue). I'm experimenting with third and second person mix, highly…volatile. Tell me the pros and cons.

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Another dream wasted on you.

He's finding it hard to keep the contents of his stomach from rising with the steam of the shower. Standing underneath the water, letting it run over his face, and all the seams of him are stretching, protesting. Something inside needing to be let free. The tiles containing each echo, boxed and beautiful. He vomits and watches as the slippery stuff slides around the mesh drain between his feet, a drop or two finding their ways down his stomach down his legs in the middle of his toes. Now the hot, stuffed cotton feeling leaves and he's unnervingly empty. No, _no_ soap in the dish. Clammy and shaking, stepping out.

Another decay because of you.

In front of the fogged mirror, screaming into the scratchy towel. Blindly, buttons coming undone, he reaches for the toothpaste and toothbrush, finger prints over clean cylindrical glass. Stiff bristles to gums, and he's bleeding. Since when has this anemia been so prevalent, in every facet. Elevators causing nosebleeds; his brain is coming loose, tearing from the walls of his skull. Things are going wrong, the washers and the bolts rusting and crumbling. He's going under and forgetting more frequently (let's not pretend it hasn't happened before, to all of them, more than once—it has, _it has_), until his upper lip gets wet and there's the smear of hundreds of thousands of platelets on three skinny fingers. Feeling the die in a breast pocket, a madman reaching for angels' hands. Ripping out the needle and standing up. Walking, weak knees, falling down. And the _darling_s, the _love_s, the arms lifting him onto a cot, a lawn chair. Cobb with accented squints in his direction. He's shaking off harder and rolling over faster and huffing angrier. It's all falling apart, the system. Even Ariadne notices; she does, _she does_.

Another escape curbed by you.

He can't deny the fear he feels in your dreamscapes, leaving footprints through your head. How your smell comes down with the rain, the same spark in every pair of eyes that look towards him—their jealousy, earnest recklessness. Your subconscious' face around every corner; he's waiting for the knife or for the kiss. Self-induced suffocation. Clawing off the tie and the vest, tripping over shoelaces to try and reach safety. How quickly he's blurred the line between cause and cure in these places, between your buildings and your walls. You let the confusion permeate him; you know what you're doing, _you know_. Open spaces fill up, one after the other. Plazas for parks, skyscrapers for seas. Chasing him, crashing in around him. You're trying to root him out. And around the sheer material _mass_ of everything, he tries to breathe and tries to breathe. A mouse in your corner in expensive slacks. He pulls on an old t-shirt and tries to forget when the familiar material brushes over his face, flipping the switch. Hand over cheek in the dark, scrubbing. He hasn't shaved since the last practice, the last maze. Under the sheets when the question comes; where was he, again. The die in his palm with its side-leaning tendencies—he wonders if the sand has made you sink so low that you've… you wouldn't, no, no, _you just wouldn't_. He flips the light back and puts the toothpaste on damp, stiff bristles.

Another confidence doubted over you.

Cobb comes to him, professional, after the tip you did in the dream. Seeing his shocked face, the holes for eyes and mouth as three circles within a frame. Cobb's wondering if the kid knows this is for real, this _thing_. Because the Extractor has seen orchestration, done it, and tells him you're treading dangerous water. He nods as placidly as a sunny day lake, unable to free from this internal tailspin. Freaking out. Cobb makes a face like he isn't taking this seriously. He's been biting his lips in his sleep, the things he should say unsaid. About the sickness in health and the blood clots and the leaky brain, the anemia and the faucet of a nose he's had. You're bruising him in your dreams. "Arthur," Cobb deadpans. He smiles, and the Extractor slides back to a desk, work, with the ease of neglect and decline. As he walks from the room with his polished brogues glinting, Ariadne catches him with her overhearing ears. Concern settled heavily between her eyes. Using the sunlight to his advantage he dazzles her with shining lies, hand in pocket, die in hand. Tell him again, who is he. A dot of his saliva drying on her cheek. Himself, or you?

He falls asleep with the sheets scratching your scabs along his back.

He was washing his hands for the third time and in the bathroom mirror it was starting again. The basement hole-restaurant's yours, a historical mechanized Japanese knock-off. The raw fish smell mild and hanging dry behind his eyes, boiling in the acid of his stomach. It's like you could predict it; the right amount of wasabi and pickled ginger so nauseatingly pale. That he'd order, that he'd eat, that he'd bleed all over the chintzy formica counter and the navy lapels of his suit jacket.

"A bit overdressed, aren't we?"

Your fingernails short and ridged grabbed away the individual-use hand towel from his own, chipped and tinged nicotine yellow. You brushed the fabric over his collarbone, his eyes emblazoning the imprint of a faucet on to your features, your eyelashes the hundred legs of some dark centipede.

"One'd think the Point Man wanted to impress," with that corner-of-the-mouth smirk you'd perfected in his dreams, in his reality, in between.

"What are you doing here," he demanded, unintelligent and assuming. When your eyes flicked up to his in the mirror he bristled, self-aware suddenly to the point of jumping when your finger rubbed innocently against his neck.

"I'm not allowed to visit my love when he's in my own dreamscape?" It wasn't a question as much as it was an excuse to wrap your other arm around his waist, tuck your nose behind the shell of his ear.

"But Ariadne—"

"Wouldn't know how to make you so easy to find on a simple practice run." Your mouth soured to a disappointed smile from this new knowing, something so handsome he found it frightening. "Oh, Arthur, you're completely unassuming. It's devastatingly adorable."

He started to withdraw but your fingers had found their ways into the hair at the nape of his neck, pulling back. He closed his eyes with a grimace when your lips met his skin, the arch. He felt his skull shift apart like a contusion, like an infant's soft spot abused. The blood from his nose had made its way to the front of his teeth and when his lips drug back over the slick calcium structures they were pink with his fleshy fear.

"I—I have to wash—My nose, I need—"

You snarl, pull his head back further. "What you _need_, darling, is to be _quiet_."

So he became, like he had always become at your beckoning. Limply he waited for your hands to make him hard, for your fingers to find the spots that made you moan. And _you knew_, you knew them all. Every single spot he had had been mapped out by you during the between-times, the beginning, the middle, the end. He is waiting for the brick wall to come rushing up in the rearview as he backs out, he is waiting for your attentiveness to wind a cherry stem knot into any plan, every plan, to keep him quiet and compliant. Because what if, he thought, biting his own bloody lip in the mirror as you turned him round, took him from behind, what if someone found out. Stifling a scream so those in the next room wouldn't hear the way you pleased him, pet him, tortured him. Keeping the truth a secret always seemed like a bigger, stranger thing to do than letting it free; in something besides this, in anything but this. You said, but games are fun, and they are even more fun done alone. So he became, alone.

Then, one day, he wakes up and the die is nowhere to be found. He finds you, though, soft like the sun and melting quickly into oil around his own feet. Disheveled he appeared at your door, dissolving. "Tell me," he begs. "Tell me what's real, Eames. I don't know what's real anymore."

So you take him inside, take his shoulders into your hands and squeeze them tight. "What do you do, Arthur."

He shuts his eyes and breathes. "I go under with you and Cobb and Ariadne, sometimes. We do things. We do things to people in their own minds."

"And what happens, Arthur."

"We get to live for one more day. We get to go to sleep and wake up. We get money to pay to rent hotel rooms to go under in. We get a challenge. We get to play God."

Your voice low in his ear. "And where are you right now, love."

He breathes, "Near you, near your body," and steps forward to press his hips to yours.

"And do you care if we're awake or not." You're turning circles, moving a palm down to his lower back to really pack a punch. He's re-forming against you, backwards-melting into your arms.

"Not now, no, not now."

You take his lips in yours and they're already hot from frustration, from trying to figure things out—the familiar taste of iron mingles when your tongue touches his, when you use it to send his head swimming. You push him up to the closed door and he takes your belt buckle between two hands and soon there's nothing left to grab but sweat-slicked skin, too-short nails digging into his own instead of yours. He's destructing unto himself.

Another self-made promise broken because of you.

His hole is tight, making your processes stagger for the one second (eternity) it takes for him to get used to having you inside of him again—he cries out and you growl deep in your throat from the effort it takes to not lose it right then and there. He's lithe and squirming further onto your cock as you hold him to the door, legs wrapped around your waist. He's braced himself in the narrow entrance alcove, throwing his head back against the peep hole on the door. When he moans you realize there is no better method to pulling the wool over someone's eyes than showing it to them first.

He's a mess of shakes and sweat when you and he are both sated, slumped against the doorframe and panting. Then like lightning his is away from you (the sudden coldness felt from his fingertips to toes) and onto his feet, saying, "I need to go find it, where could it be, why don't I have it—" until his glazed eyes slide to yours. Your face split open by that crocodile smile.

"Relax," fishing out a piece of plastic from the back of your mouth, his gaping stare. You put the saliva-covered die into his palm. Like cattle led to slaughter he asks,

"What is the most contagious thing?"

Your reply: "An idea."

He still isn't accepting it. The die in his hand, air-drying. He looks like he is going to eat it, or throw it, but it is hard to tell which because he is towering over you with his back to the light. Then, softly, "It didn't _appear_ out of _nowhere_, it was already _there_."

You're sneering, unsheathing the knife, "Call it hypochondriasis, _darling_."


End file.
